By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs (21 page)

There were times when it was of marginal
value for Alan to take the
Pegasus
out and practice, but he
went anyway, because Mavis put such store in it. He felt like a
prize fighter whose manager keeps pushing aerobics, when all the
fighter needs is a little lesson in tap dancing. Yet she had no
real power over him, despite her incredibly effective record of
fund raising.

He stood on the dock, half-listening to his
navigator's technical chit-chat, the rest of his consciousness
split among a dozen avenues of thought: Would the new mainsail be
re-cut in time to use this morning? Should they break down and
order new custom cheek-blocks to be fabricated? Would Tommy's arm
mend in time for Australia? Should they build a bigger box for the
on-board computer, or was it overheating for some other reason? Who
had ordered the pizzas and why the
hell
had he agreed to be
interviewed by that child?

"Alan!" came a breathless voice behind him
"The mainsail's done; they're carting it down from the shed now!"
The crewman—hardly more than a boy—looked thrilled to be the bearer
of such glad tidings.

"Good. We'll leave the dock in ten
minutes."

****

Quinta spent forty-eight hours waiting in
vain for the next incident of terrorism, then got back to work. She
had a piece on Alan Seton to write, and it wasn't going to be easy.
She'd led her editor to believe that she could deliver the goods,
but now that it came right down to it, she didn't seem to have any
goods to deliver. She stared glassy-eyed at her computer screen in
her tiny office overlooking Queen Anne Square until the words she'd
written so far—six—began to twitch and jump on the screen:
When
a man like Alan Seton ....

What could she write about a man like Alan
Seton that hadn't already been written? The little he'd said for
the record had been pounded into dust by a hundred different
keyboards. Not to mention, she'd granted him approval over her
write-up of the interview (something a
New York Times
reporter never would have done). She felt hamstrung. She felt dull.
She felt distracted. She wanted desperately to write the article at
home, on her father's Mac; that way she could keep one eye for
evildoers on the front lawn. But the world had a crying need for
software manuals and her father had a deadline to produce one; he
would not give up his Mac to her.

When a man like Alan Seton...

She conjured up a picture of the man Alan
Seton. Tanned face, unfashionably shaggy black hair. Slow to smile,
but when he did, it was the real thing. A searching blue gaze that
left you room to hide when you needed it. Gentle with children and
pets. Standing on the middle step of her porch. Whispering, "Take
care."

This was the Alan Seton she wanted to write
about; the Alan Seton of 1983; the only one she knew.

When a man like Alan Seton drags himself
from the rubble of personal disaster to track down a puppy for a
frightened teenager, it isn't because he has nothing more important
to do. It's because he hasn't renounced ordinary, decent values in
one of the most demanding pursuits of modern times: the quest for
the America's Cup.

The rest of the story tumbled over the keys
of the computer, a straightforward account of a public figure
acting with kindness out of range of a camera. Quinta reread it
when she was done and thought that maybe it wasn't a Cup piece at
all, but a belated valentine from her to Alan. In any case, she did
not feel that she had to submit it to him for his approval; it fell
completely outside the range of their interview. She printed it out
and placed the piece on her editor's desk. It was ten o'clock at
night and Quinta, heading for home, was dog-tired.

Not so the rest of Newport's youth. The
younger among them were hanging out in Queen Anne Square and along
The Wall—a low stone divider that split north and southbound
traffic along America's Cup Avenue—under the watchful eyes of
several of Newport's Finest. As Quinta walked among the crush of
tourists and late diners past the blasé kids, it occurred to her
that she had skipped the hanging-out phase of her life completely.
Casing out the opposite sex; flaunting one's act and seeing how it
played with them: it was a teenager's right, a teenager's duty.

But Quinta had spent those years playing
nurse to a reluctant patient, and as a result she'd neither cased
nor flaunted. Four boyfriends and almost a virgin. Not much of a
record. The main reason she did consent to have sex with one of
them (the third one) was that she couldn't bear the thought of
walking past The Wall knowing that an awful lot of kids on it had
more experience than she did. Not the best motive in the world, but
on the other hand it did give her the confidence to say no to
number four, a real jerk who liked to kiss and tell. They were all
so young, so silly and young.

I am going to be an old maid
, she
told herself
.
I am like my father: socially inept,
secretly arrogant.
Some combination
.

She watched with awe as a young woman her
age, dressed in a smashing black jumpsuit pegged at the ankles and
plunging recklessly to the waist in the back, climbed out of a red
Corvette with the help of her date, a preppy type with apparently
no redeeming value besides his wealth, teeth, and hair. It never
would have occurred to Quinta to load up
her
left arm with
heavy silver bangles the way the woman had, or to mousse
her
blond hair into a spiky mass. Those were things you learned from
your peers or (if you didn't have such elegant peers) from sitting
on The Wall and taking notes.

Nuts
, she thought
.
Who
cares
?

She stepped up her pace, tired of the
nightly wade through a sea of humanity to get to her house. Thames
Street would be hers again after Labor Day, but that seemed so far
away. Still, the moment she turned onto Howard Street, her street,
the usual peace and stillness prevailed. She was hurrying up the
wheelchair ramp of her unlit porch when her foot stepped into
something sticky and wet and slid out from under her, bringing her
to her hands and knees on the ramp. Quinta knelt for an instant in
the wet pool, disgusted and afraid. Then she smelled paint.
Damn.

She stood up, loath to step forward, feeling
her way gingerly with the toe of each shoe until she reached the
front door. There was no doubt in her mind that her white pants
were ruined, so she wiped the palms of her hands on the front of
them, then fumbled in her purse with still-sticky hands for her
keys. She slipped out of her sandals, put her key in the lock,
turned the carved brass doorknob with two fingers, pushed the door
open with her elbow, and stepped inside, uncertain whether to try
to sneak past her father and clean up.

But it was an idle thought. Leggy was
already there, sniffing her curiously as she tried to shoo him
away. The rolling of her father's wheelchair drew steadily closer
as he rounded into the hall, flipping on the hall light and saying,
"Quinta? What took you so long?"

He took one look at his barefoot daughter,
smeared all over in blood-red, and gasped. "My God, you're
hurt!"

"No, no, it's just paint. I slipped and
fell. Someone dumped paint on the ramp," she said, looking down at
herself with similar horror. She looked like she'd just come back
from a bloody murder.

She'd been waiting for the Reebok shoe to
fall, and it had, with a vengeance. She was muttering little words
of disgust when her father said, surprisingly, "Do you think it's a
copy-cat prank? I've read that one act of vandalism breeds another.
If someone read about the broken window, do you think they'd come
around to do one better?"

She seized on the idea; anything for time to
think. "It's a possibility," she said, heading for the basement and
the paint thinner. "It's hard to believe that anyone could be so
senselessly mean, but then, look at what vandals do to schools and
graveyards and churches—"

"So we shouldn't call the police, in other
words? Because we might be inviting more trouble?" He was looking
at her with open anxiety now. Neil Powers had no idea how people
who shaved their heads and wore six earrings in each ear thought;
he was looking to his daughter for guidance. She may not have been
one of them, but she was closer to their generation than he
was.

It also occurred to Quinta that her father
really, truly was at the mercy of anyone with two good legs, even
if that person did possess only half a brain. Her father had seemed
so fiercely independent up until now, so determined to use his
intelligence to make up for his stolen mobility, that it was hard
for her to see him as a helpless victim. It was her supreme
compliment to him. But it made the confusion in his face that much
more painful to accept.

"No, I don't think we should call the
police," she said at last, pausing at the door to the basement
stairs. "If tonight was a copy-cat thing, then we
would
be
inviting more trouble when the vandalism got reported. If it is the
same person—Oh Leggy, stop it! Stop playing!—then he's going to try
another of his cute tricks pretty soon. This time we'll be ready
for him, Dad. Damn it. This time we'll be ready."

He looked by no means convinced, but he let
her go downstairs to clean up.

In the basement Quinta doused a rag with
turpentine and scrubbed her hands and toes clean of the red paint.
It was in her hair, somehow; she scrubbed the red-tipped ends with
a rag, toting up the cost of the vicious little deed. She'd bought
the pants at full price, before the July clearance. The sandals
were nearly new: half-price and a terrific bargain, wasted. She
didn't know which loss offended her more.

Somewhere between the front door and the
basement, her fear had turned to coal-hot anger; maybe it had
happened when she saw that her father—her father, who'd gone to sea
and survived a wreck on a reef!—was afraid. She'd read about these
sadistic campaigns against the helpless and the frail; but her
father was neither of those things, and neither was she. The house
had a burglar alarm; they'd start using it. She'd get some mace. A
gun, if they had to. And they had Leggy, who'd certainly bark if
someone actually made it inside. Too bad he wasn't a pit bull. She
slammed the rag into a metal waste bin, aware that she was working
herself into a fury. What would Dirty Harry do?

"Dad," she said, on her way upstairs to
shower, "I'm bringing my computer home. I can write as well in my
room as I can at the office. Frank will understand. When I'm not
down at the docks covering the
Pegasus
story, I'll be here.
When we catch this guy we're going to break his legs
and
his
arms, and then we'll see how quick he is."

Her father actually laughed.

****

At sunup Quinta was crouched over the nearly
dried mess on the wheelchair ramp, scraping it clean. She washed
down the ramp with paint thinner, then went inside and cleaned up
and had a quick breakfast of yogurt and toast, glancing outside
repeatedly to make certain that the Reebok man didn't toss a
lighted match at her work. It was a measure of her paranoia that
she considered such an event was actually possible.

Her father was sleeping in. The door to his
room remained shut, and she wondered whether it was because he'd
had a terrible night's sleep, as she had, or whether he was ashamed
to face her after having faltered in his courage the night before.
She wanted desperately to comfort him, but of course he would
reject any such attempt, just as he always had. Maybe it was time
to let one of her sisters know what was going on. Maybe
tonight.

Quinta drove to her office, explained to
Frank that her father had "had a little turn," and packed up her
monitor, keyboard and computer into a cardboard box. When she
returned home, her father was up, looking not so much embarrassed
as thoughtful. And very tired: the lines around his eyes seemed to
have developed into deep grooves, as though he'd passed the night
squinting into some void, trying to distinguish between shades of
black.

"I took Leggy out myself this morning," he
said, scooping into a bowl of bran flakes, "and had a look around.
I saw old Mrs. Salantis up the street and asked her if she'd
noticed anything last night. She didn't actually see anything—her
osteoporosis is much worse, did you know that? Which is why I
haven't seen her in months; I'll have to drop by—but she did hear a
car that was parked in front of her house bump hard into the car
behind it, then tear off squealing. 'Like a bank robber,' she said.
So now we know it isn't kids."

"If
that's who she heard, Dad. It
could have been a drunk."

He shook his head. "Too early for a drunk.
She said it happened about nine-thirty." Everyone who lived in the
downtown harborfront knew that the true drunk didn't crawl back to
his car until after the bars closed .

"Too bad you didn't see the car. Or better
yet, see
him,"
Quinta said wistfully. "You have such great
recall of faces; you'd be able to pick him out of any lineup."

"I suppose I could," Neil agreed. He downed
the last of his prune juice. "Sooner or later I'll have my
chance."

It was no longer a question between them of
if, but of when
.
When
they caught the evildoer, when
they had him arrested, when they prosecuted him. They were partners
now, each pledged to contribute his or her particular skills to a
common end. They seemed more comfortable with one another; there
was less game-playing, less second-guessing. Like soldiers in
combat, they were learning to trust one another.

****

A week later the
Pegasus
was being
wheeled out of an old wooden shed in the shipyard that Quinta's
step-grandfather had briefly managed half a century earlier, its
latest round of modifications complete. The boat would be sailed
for a week, then hauled again and broken down for the trip to
Australia aboard a freighter. A bright blue plastic skirt was taped
around her waterline, hiding the top-secret keel from spies and
well-wishers alike. Like a skittish thoroughbred on her way to the
gate, the
Pegasus
edged ever closer to the water. The white
winged horse that was painted on each side of her dark-blue hull
did exactly what it was supposed to do: convinced the onlookers
that the
Pegasus
could fly.